My Mom Died
She would have been ninety-six at the end of January. Her name was Evangeline, but most people called her Ann. She lived in Paris for a year, working for Anne Klein as a fashion designer. She studied maritime law in the 70s, the only woman in her class and the program. She made most of her money by working as a set designer for two male fashion photographers. She returned to school in her thirties and began teaching middle and high school science courses. Geology was her favorite. When she retired at sixty-five, she returned to school for another degree and became a school librarian before retiring for good.
She adopted me when she was forty-eight, in 1979, when women could not adopt without a husband. She never married or dated. She found men beneath her. She changed the oil in her car, wallpapered the walls in her home, cooked, baked, and owned two homes by the time I came into her life.
She traveled the world before me but also took me with her to Machu Picchu, Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands, Guatemala, England, Greece, California, Denver, Colorado, and everywhere else in the US.
I found an FBI ID card among her belongings that identified her as a researcher.
She was funny and cold and disapproving and driven and independent and abusive and giving and smart and arrogant and insecure and resilient and proud and bold and vindictive all at the same time. Every time my mother called me, my best friend had to rush over and remove all my medications. She tucked them into her purse, brought me ice cream, and sat with me until I fell asleep.
The hospital called me to tell me my mother seemed confused. Dementia, they said, and discharged her. Her apartment was infested with German roaches, and I sat on her couch and watched them hop from her furniture to the floor to her ankles. “I’m trying not to eat anything,” she told me. “So they will die off.” She laughed. “Aw,” was all I could muster.
Her frailty replaced my anger with something I still don’t know how to name. It sat inside my gut like a heavy, gritty rock, but it was quiet. Powerless. It had nowhere to go because she wasn’t fully there. The parts that remained were funny and sad. Childlike.
She died with me liking her. She called me her angel for swooping in and saving her, so perhaps she died liking me, too. And maybe that is enough.
Marina DelVecchio, PhD, is an award-winning author of the YA novel, Dear Jane, named in Kirkus’ List for Best Indie Debut Novels of 2019. She is also the author of The Professor’s Wife (2021), The Virgin Chronicles (2022), and Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter (2024). Her essays appear in Ms. Magazine, The Huffington Post, The New Agenda, The Tishman Review, WE Magazine for Women, and Vast Literary Magazine, among others. She is a professor at San Francisco Bay University in California.
